Jonathan Marcus Blog

Tuesday, January 2, 2018

An abstract
pencil sketch of human history appears as crazy squiggles springing forth and
shriveling back. Empires rise and shine. Sooner or later they run out of fuel,
and shrink. Maybe it’s firewood—they burn it all. Maybe it’s wheat fields,
succumbing to drought. Maybe it’s common sense, collapsing in the darkness of
closed minds. Whatever it is, each empire falters, bleeds out . . . each fire
finally dims as another blazes. These transitions register suddenly, while the critical
gravities gather slowly and silently.

The rise and
fall of empires are reflected as fractal patterns in see-saw cultural shifts,
such as the recent collapse of Harvey Weinstein: “instantly” women are
empowered to speak out against sexual abuse and manipulation.

Well, first
of all: YaaaaY!!!

But let’s
look beyond the moment, and ask what has been going on here . . .

Why are so
many cultures around the world mean to women? Really, really mean. And
humiliating.

Who thought
this was a good idea?

Apparently,
men.

Men have
been bullying and silencing and abusing women in a lot of ways in a lot of
places for a lot of centuries.

Have you ever
visited a society where women beat up men and rape them and pay them less? And
then kill them? Um, no.

Misogyny is so
pervasive. Whether overt or covert, it’s pretty much world-wide, full
time/space continuum.

Why?

Wouldn’t
everyone—without being instructed—revere women, at the extreme fundamental
minimum, for giving birth? Or are some guys somehow upset by such a miracle? Is
it jealousy, guys, because no man could ever achieve anything equaling birth? Or
are you, the hirsute mastodon-slaying monster, secretly afraid of women?

Let’s look
at what the French call la difference.

Masculine
energy. Feminine energy. Two different trajectories, two distinct interfaces
with life.

If you’ll
share in the gloss of over-simplification based on our hereditary roles: Men
kill. Women nurture.

Not that all
killing is pure evil. Not at all. To be sure, murder is often pure evil. Yet killing
is also life feasting on life. In the natural world, killing is a vital part of
the process. And in the human realm, we have to kill to survive, either plants
or animals, your choice, but no matter how you cut it, you have to kill to
live. It’s part of your job here, to keep the goods in motion. Biological
energy doesn’t want to stand still.

And men are
good at killing. God bless ‘em. Whether it’s wheat or whales or cotton or
mutton or mussels, men will bring home the bacon. It’s good, honest work, this kind
of killing, and it’s pretty simple. You either bring home the bacon, or you become
brunch.

While men
kill, women nurture. Turns out the nurturing thing can be a lot more
complicated than the killing thing. Nurturing weaves fluid combinations of observation,
adaptability, subtlety, and quiet assertion. This skill set, in toto, emanates
from a subtly complex interface with life – a degree of complexity beyond the direct,
the blunt and the forceful elements of execution.

It’s not
that simple, of course. The yin/yang/ masculine/feminine/ yoni/lingam tide ebbs
and flows in each of us. Which brings us, obviously, to the Ten Commandments .
. .

Wednesday, July 19, 2017

When you
boil away the fat by walking thousands of feet and looking around and around, the
question Galileo was asking in his prison cell when the pope locked him up for a
new fact (that offended God?!?!?) boils down to simply this: How can smart
people convince dumb people that brains are not spleens?

Or: Why do dumb
guys lock up smart guys for new ideas?

Obviously,
this is no fun for the smart guys.

But how much
fun is this for the dumb guys?

Are they too
dumb to have fun? ‘Cause it’s way more fun to have new idea than it is to kill
a new idea.

Not that
“dumb” and “smart” are the best ways to frame it. Let’s say curious. The curious
love a good question. What’s the antonym of curious? Whatever it is, they want
to kill a good question. Open doors are the enemy of closed-mindedness.

Not that you
can kill it. The good ideas springs from inevitability, the eternal springs of the bright blue future, and you foil it at your
peril.

Thursday, June 8, 2017

Science.
Politics. Art.

Galileo scientifically
figured out that the earth is not the center of the universe. He got really
excited! This was great new information! But the Catholic Church, the de facto government,
not only failed to celebrate this scientific revelation, but all the church panjandrums
forgot revelations completely and instead got real pouty that some mere
scientist would refute the word of God and say the earth is not the center of
the universe. Oy, the heresy! So they arrested one of the greatest scientists
of the century, and threw him in the slammer.

Wouldn’t it
be funny if a modern government got upset by some facts?

If Galileo
were here today, his heresy would be stating the obvious.

Galileo
would ask questions no one wants to ask too loudly . . .

“Modern
people have democracy. How long do modern people vote against their best
interests?”

“They
doubt science? Yet they love the military? Do they not know that the military
is built on science? That without scientific exploration, we would not have
self-navigating bombs? And radar? And radar-evading jets? And it’s not just the
military that science enables. Science enables the highways you all drive every
day, and pure science promulgated the prototype of the internet, on which you
all also drive every day. All because of science. And you disparage science?
For this larval level of stupidity I came back here? After being jailed by the
pope for doing science?”

“Frances
Bacon was knighted. He was knighted? For what does a scientist need a tin suit
and a sword? And for what I was I jailed?”

How does the
genius scientist convince small-minded power mongers to please just let me keep
on stretching the boundaries of human knowledge?

This doesn’t
exactly bring us to art, but one must wonder . . . if small minded power
brokers have so much trouble with the truths of science—which confers lavish
benefits of human life—how do they tolerate art? Because art is even weirder: while
it shares with science urges to stretch the boundaries of human experience, unlike
science art produces permanently useless objects whose only distinction from
the ordinary materials of which they are made is the way they look. And yet,
every society around the world values art. The forms vary widely. The apparent uselessness
binds.

Science. Politics.
Art. It’s like having three feet that you keep looking at. Twice. You want them
to dance . . .

Saturday, May 27, 2017

Obviously,
this brings us to the Founding Fathers.

They wanted
people to bounce off their shoulders. They argued about how to pack that punch,
and spawn that bounce. And spawn they did, with over three hundred million great-great-great
grandchildren bouncing around. Even if they were not all that great. Some turned out really great! Some didn’t! But the
whole enterprise still bounces like crazy.

It didn’t
have to. It wasn’t guaranteed. We could have been like Brazil for the past
three centuries. Nothing against Brazil, but as far as an idea with some bounce
in the political realm, well, the United States has been as bouncy as it gets these
past coupla centuries

The Founding
Fathers’ idea was not ultimately an idea. It was an impulse, and the quest was
how to fashion an idea to support the impulse to spawn max bounce.

And here is
the kernel of our miraculous national inception: The rich guys gave their power
away. That’s what happened. The rich guys who could have formed an oligarchy
club, they gave their power away. Never happened before, not in any history I’ve
ever read.

Sunday, May 21, 2017

Yes, artists
look at their feet a lot more than twice. Artists look at their feet until
their feet meld with the substrate; until their feet melt into color fields shimmering
on other color fields so the absolute delineations of what are feet vs. what
are not feet crumble under the mighty scrutiny of which the human brain is
capable given time + desire + cogency + direct perception, which are the very
same rotors that serve science.

What unites
science and art is the fundamental impulse that what’s been done is not yet done:
as much as we are grateful for the shoulders of the giants on which we stand, we
are not content to merely stand on those shoulders. We want to leap from them. And
we want our shoulders to become trampolines from which others bounce.

Thursday, May 11, 2017

Obviously,
this brings us to Charles Sanders Pierce, probably the most extremely
underappreciated American since way before the beatniks.

A contemporary of the robber barons, with whom
he shared nothing, especially wealth, he plunged feet first into new ground in
philosophy, mathematics, logic, and pure science. You know, the invisible stuff
politicians sneeze at.

In the
1870s, Pierce speculated that this new-fangled electricity thing could be used
to send tiny blips over the electrical wires, in little coded packs of impulses.
Like little digits. Digits of coded information. Purely theoretical. Of no use
whatsoever. The barons were building railroads, and you could carry stuff
around on them. Pierce was building a vast super highway in his mind, and you
couldn’t carry anything on it. It was of no value whatsoever . . .

. . . Until
about a hundred years later, when the U.S. government (Department of Defense)
applied Pierce’s vision in a particular way, and the prototype of the internet
came into being. You could carry a lot of imaginary stuff on it. And the government
made it. Out of a theory, and some wires, and some electricity.

Sounds like
a fairy tale: Destitute genius imagines something that only the government has
the imagination to actually create. We all live happily ever after. In our new
shoes. Two shoes. Looking at both twice.